Saturday, October 29, 2016

Russia has No Allies for Any War with the West, Shtepa Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, October 29 – Many in
Russia and the West are now talking about a third world war, but if the
conflict between Russia and the West in fact escalates, it won’t be like either
World War I or World War, conflicts that involved large alliances. But in any
future war in that Russia will have no allies, Vadim Shtepa says.

When Kremlin propagandists talk
about the prospects for a third world war or when Russians speculate about what
it might look like, neither, the Russian regionalist writer points out,
reflects that unlike in past wars, Russia will have no allies in a future one,
a kind of state “loneliness” that will make any such conflict very different
from a world war (spektr.press/odinochestvo-rossii-pochemu-ne-vyhodit-sygrat-v-tretyu-mirovuyu/).

“Who could be part of a bloc with
Russia in the event of a hypothetical clash with NATO?”No one or at least no one important, Shtepa
says. Not China, Belarus or Kazakhstan, but perhaps “only the unrecognized
pseudo-states like the DNR and LNR, Transdniestria and South Osetia and also
possibly the Pacific archipelago of Tuvalu.”

While the Kremlin talks about the
possibility of a world war, its policies have so alienated everyone else that
Vladimir Putin has reduced the allies Russia to the only two Tsar Aleksandr III
famously described, “its army and its fleet.”And as a result, Russia is left in the position of “proud loneliness.”

There is “a certain historical and
geographical mysticism” in this situation, Shtepa says. “In the wars of the 18th
through the 20th century, Russia typically was part of one of the
global blocs against others. One of the few exceptions was the Crimean War of
1853-`856 when Russia clashed with all the world powers at one and the same
time and lost the war.”

The
current global crisis began this time in Crimea, the commentator says. “Having
annexed the peninsula, the Kremlin powers that be in fact declared to the
world: we want to be ‘a great power’ and we spit on all international
treaties.” You on the other hand, the Kremlin said, must follow all agreements
you make with us or we won’t keep any of them.

Over the last two decades, Russia
has harming its relations not only with Western countries but “even with the
majority of neighbors in the post-Soviet space because the Kremlin out of
Soviet habit considers all this space ‘its own,’” a view the others cannot help
but be angry about.

“By trying to continue the imperial
tradition,” Shtepa says, “the Kremlin leadership has completely failed to see
that any empire pretending to global status must also have global
attractiveness, something it can have only by offering the world such a
civilizational project that other countries will want to join it.”

The Soviet Union both in its first
days and then as a leader in the anti-fascist effort was such a country and
that allowed it to become part of the anti-Nazi coalition. But today, the
Kremlin empire offers nothing of the kind.Its “Russia world” is offensive to everyone: even Belarusian leader Alyaksandr
Lukashenka has suggested Moscow should drop it.

And the current Moscow leadership
has compounded the problem by seeking to portray itself as an advocate of a
certain kind of “’moral conservatism’” even though the people making this claim
are former communists. As a result, the Kremlin’s “’neo-Orthodoxy’ surprisingly
coincides with the ideologues of ISIS” on many points.

In fact, Shtepa says, “all the
geopolitical projects of the Kremlin, including even the

Effort
to place the card of world separatism, is clearly reactive: its chief goal is
anti-Americanism. But no projects, build on an ‘anti’ basis alone without
having any positive content will ever win.”

There are of course many countries
in the world that have problems with the US, but “the era when Moscow
considered itself the leader of ‘all progressive humanity’ has long passed, but
it appears that the residents of the Kremlin still live as if that were
true.”They have forgotten something
else as well.

“Historically, World War III already
happened: it was called ‘the cold war.’” And in the conflict the US and its
allies achieved “an unqualified victory over the USSR and more generally the
Soviet bloc, but the main weapons of this war were not rockets but rather
computers, jeans, and rock and roll.”

“This was a war for the free
contemporary individual, with all the multiplicity of his interests, against
the old ideological dogmas which remained from what was once revolutionary
communism,” Shtepa continues. “The aging Politburgo with its cult of ‘the
heroic past’ didn’t have the necessary soft power and therefore inevitably lost
this war.”

This is true of Putin’s regime as
well, but his situation is even worse from his point of view. At least the
Soviets proclaimed that they were always engaged in “’a struggle for peace.’” Putin
can make no such claim given his aggressive war. But he fails to understand
that or that the USSR lost the Cold War not because of an American conspiracy
but because of its own failings.

Putin’s obsessive cult about victory
in World War II reflects his desire to return to a time when Moscow really did
have the power to get its way on many things.But the current regime because it doesn’t want to understand the
contemporary world acts as it if can restore things to what they were 70 years
ago.

As a result, Shtepa concludes,
“Russia finds itself not only in political but in historical loneliness”
because while the rest of the world is focusing on new technologies, Russians
under Putin are “dreaming about the era of Stalin or even worse Ivan the Terrible.”
And that points to a real disaster ahead.

The current situation resembles all
too closely the era of the 19th century Crimea War, a conflict
Russia lost but could only recover from by engaging in reforms at home.
Unfortunately, Shtepa says, “the current Kremlin powers that be are hardly
capable of such a transformation.”